Question

1. Explain how/why successful differentiation must take into account the four areas listed below. Discuss these SEPARATELY for each of the four items. Let me rephrase the question (I will use the first bullet – competition): Fully discuss all the issues that relate to competition that might negatively impact your differentiation success. In other words, what can competition do to make your differentiation strategy not be successful?    

1. Competition
2. Consumers
3. Suppliers
4. An internal organizational issue (i.e., an organizational resource/capability argument)

Answer 1

Answer 1:

Successful differentiation must take into account the four areas listed below because these four areas will have severe adverse impact on the differentiation and differentiation will not get success unless these four areas are well managed by the organization. The organization need to manage the potential negative impacts that these four areas can create for the differentiation as below

· Competition: Competition will have adverse impact on the organization due to lack of differentiation products that can create the product library which will cater the consumer product demands in the market. The differentiation process will create negative impact on the differentiation if the differentiated products are of poor quality and reliability. These needs to be of market desired quality and should meet expected reliability and durability. Thus competition differentiation need to be understand by the business and need to come out with the differentiation products that are capable to meet competition requirements.

· Consumers: Consumers have different requirements and taste. Consumer demands are dynamic and these changes with time. So consumer dynamic requirement can have negative impact on the differentiation products. Thus the differentiation need to be managed in such a way that it can manage the dynamic need of consumers and it can avoid the negative impacts that consumers can have on the differentiation.

· Suppliers: Differentiation can create problem for suppliers as supplier need to manage low volume high variety products. Thus it will increase cost for suppliers and will have adverse impact on the differentiation. Thus the suppliers need to be managed in such a way that they will support the differentiation and have the capability to meet the dynamic demand of differentiation products. Thus suppliers need to be well managed so that they will help in achieving differentiation product development and supplies.

· An internal organizational issue (i.e, an organizational resource/capability argument): This is a key point that organization internal issues could have negative impact on the differentiation because resource, capability issue may have impact on development of differentiation products. Thus we need to manage the internal issues such that these will not have any adverse impact on the differentiation and differentiation will get succeed.